{"id":28582,"date":"2011-01-13T09:05:37","date_gmt":"2011-01-13T17:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=28582"},"modified":"2011-01-13T09:08:51","modified_gmt":"2011-01-13T17:08:51","slug":"wrestling-with-my-sexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=28582","title":{"rendered":"Wrestling With My Sexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/dgmyers.blogspot.com\/2011\/01\/dialogue-in-novel.html\">Professor D.G. Myers writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nWhat I am suggesting is that the two treatments of dialogue in the  contemporary novel\u2014the scrupulous mimicry of everyday speech and the  studied exclusion of differing points of view\u2014are connected at the level  of basic assumptions about the nature of fiction in today\u2019s literary  culture. Reading Luke Ford\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/profiles\/profiles\/robb_dew.htm\" target=\"_blank\">interview<\/a> with Robb Forman Dew, I was struck by the  following exchange:<dir>Luke: \u201cDo you have any friends who are  conservative Republicans?\u201d<br \/>\nRobb, quickly: \u201cNo. I don&#8217;t think I could.  Are you?\u201d<br \/>\nLuke: \u201cYes.\u201d<br \/>\nRobb: \u201cYou are? You really are? Oh no. You  can\u2019t be.\u201d<\/dir>In the interview, conducted four years ago, Dew  supplies the premise to her brand new novel <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.hachettebookgroup.com\/books_9780316889506.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Being Polite to Hitler<\/a><\/i>. When she was a child,  she explains, two things broke her family apart\u2014\u201creligion and Hiroshima  and Nagasaki.\u201d Her uncle Brent, an \u201cairplane navigator in the Pacific,\u201d  supported Truman\u2019s decision to drop the bombs on Japan. \u201cMy father  thought there was no excuse for dropping a bomb like that on a civilian  population,\u201d she recollects. \u201cThat the government should\u2019ve dropped it  on an unpopulated island and said, \u2018This is what will happen.\u2019 \u201d Brent  dismissed the idea as \u201cromantic.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In <i>Being Polite to Hitler<\/i>,  the horror of the atomic bomb is the psychological landscape of the  novel. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Robb Forman Dew comments: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Just to be clear about my comment to Luke Ford, he had telephoned me out of the blue some years ago to discuss homosexuality, because I was a member of PFLAG at the time, and he said he was wrestling with his sexuality. I had no idea I was being interviewed, although I agreed to do an interview with him at some time.<\/p>\n<p>But let me assure you that I can well imagine a person who believes the decision to use atomic weapons to end the War in the Pacific was the only choice to be made&#8211;I haven&#8217;t decided what I think about it myself. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professor D.G. Myers writes: What I am suggesting is that the two treatments of dialogue in the contemporary novel\u2014the scrupulous mimicry of everyday speech and the studied exclusion of differing points of view\u2014are connected at the level of basic assumptions &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=28582\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[25090,14207,822,4869,1420,25089],"class_list":["post-28582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sex","tag-atomic-weapons","tag-hiroshima-and-nagasaki","tag-luke-ford","tag-new-novel","tag-reading-luke","tag-robb-forman-dew"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28582"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28585,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28582\/revisions\/28585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}